If you can do that you avoid the pitfalls of your horse just learning a job. Instead, they learn to work with you and trust your ideas with every step. If you only teach a horse to do jobs you are only teaching tricks and they will fail you when the circumstances change.
Everybody has to work through episodes of spookiness. I have never met a combination that did not experience it. It’s important to recognise that shying and spookiness is a symptom of something else. My biggest piece of advice is to address the cause and do not punish a horse for the symptom.
The next time you get frustrated because your horse keeps falling in on a circle or insists on moving with its head up or hops into the trot, ask yourself what will it take to make the new way of moving feel more comfortable than the old way?
In the process of learning and memory, the strength of the emotions we associate with the experience is a large determinant of how well we learn. An early bad experience is often associated with stronger emotions than an early good experience.
Instead of thinking about a horse’s primary thought determining the bend, consider the idea that the primary thought should direct the movement. Where a horse is thinking is where it should be moving.
